Emotional inteligence

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memories date from the first few years of life, in the relationship
between an infant and its caretakers. This is
especially true for traumatic events, like beatings or outright
neglect. During this early period of life other brain
structures, particularly the hippocampus, which is crucial
for narrative memories, and the neocortex, seat of
rational thought, have yet to become fully developed. In
memory, the amygdala and hippocampus work hand-inhand;
each stores and retrieves its special information
independently. While the hippocampus retrieves information,
the amygdala determines if that information
has any emotional valence. But the amygdala, which
matures very quickly in the infant's brain, is much closer
to fully formed at birth.
LeDoux turns to the role of the amygdala in childhood
to support what has long been a basic tenet of psychoanalytic
thought: that the interactions of life's earliest
years lay down a set of emotional lessons based on the
attunement and upsets in the contacts between infant
and caretakers. 9 These emotional lessons are so potent
and yet so difficult to understand from the vantage point
of adult life because, believes LeDoux, they are stored in
the amygdala as rough, wordless blueprints for emotional
life. Since these earliest emotional memories are established
at a time before infants have words for their
experience, when these emotional memories are